Marvel Announces ‘The First X-Men’ for August

Marvel scribe Christos Gage and legendary artist Neil Adams will team up to bring ‘The First X-Men’, a five-issue limited series, to your local comic shop this August. The news was released on Monday over Marvel Comics’ “Next Big Thing” live blog.

‘The First X-Men’ will include Wolverine, a young Charles Xavier, Erik Lensherr, and Sabretooth, and will be part of established continuity whilst filling in the grey area of X-history that exists before Uncanny X-Men began.

‘The First X-Men’ story is based on a pitch by Neil Adams to Marvel and Christos Gage came on board to help flesh out the plot into script form. X-Men editor Nick Lowe described the pairing: “It was the perfect marriage of creator and character that we knew fans would go nuts for.”

“At the beginning, Stan and Jack were experimenting,” said Neil Adams. “You had Professor X, bald and in a wheelchair. These strange kids already in costume. It seems to me like this was not the beginning of the story, but the middle.

“Of all the mutants on Earth, Professor X could easily pass as a human,” he added. “Why would he want to get involved in this? Maybe all this was going on before Professor X was Professor X…when Professor X was a teenager. Maybe mutant kids were getting abused by the military, by the government. Somebody would have been looking out for them, but maybe that person came to Charles Xavier, realizing he couldn’t protect these kids.” That someone will be Wolverine.

X-Editor Nick Lowe stirs the pot more: “In those early X-Men stories, everybody hates and fears them, but we never really know why. It’s so core to the concept, but it was there before the series started. Here we found out why mutants are so hated and feared in a way that is different from any other super heroes.”

On Friday Marvel Comics released a press release with a cryptic ‘First X-Men’ teaser image that led to some speculation, particularly who the creator involved in the project would be. The predominant rumour was Chris Claremont but turned out to be Neil Adams.

Christos Gage is particularly excited about the opportunity of working with Neil Adams: “If I had been asked for a wish list of who I’d like to work for,” he said, “Neal wouldn’t have been on it, because I wouldn’t think it would have been possible.”

Christos Gage and Neil Adams have teased that the series will include an encounter with hobo Sub-Mariner and the early models of the Sentinels (before they were giant). “There will be early versions of the Sentinels. I did the giant ones, now I’m getting to do different one,” said Adams.

Confronting possible comparisons to a certain cinematic X-origin from last year, Adams said: “The natural instinct is that this is like the ‘X-Men: First Class’ movie, but it’s not,” he said. “We didn’t mind stealing the Nazi Hunter version of Magneto though.”

“We wanted this to be something you could hand to somebody who just saw the X-Men movies and they’d enjoy it as a good X-Men story. At the same time, for giant nerds like me, FBI agent Fred Duncan from the early stories is in there, and when Professor X talks about his brother you know it’s Juggernaut.” said Christos Gage.